Zeitgeist

Memorable Moments

This space will be used to remember some of the more outstanding moments of the campaign, as decided by the GM, with input from the players.

Session One’s defining moment definitely had to be when Darsys looked down from the Berth deck and used curse of the dark dream to send the Duchess’ handmaiden screaming into her grave, just seconds away from being able to throw her ritual-enhanced rod into the engine and doom the entire ship to a fiery death.

Amid a hail of crossbow bolts, the swift Qiyet powered ahead of the rest of the party and used the Golden Icon of Avilona to fly her way up to the lighthouse in Axis Island and kill the pesky rebel wizard there with just two attacks! The poor guy could never have seen it coming.

Drew McTaggert, acting on a whim, kicked a barrel down a steep hill toward a ship docked in the harbor at the Axis Fortress. He was hoping the thing would explode on impact, but felt his efforts were rewarded nonetheless when the barrel picked up enough speed to ramp off the dock and onto the boat, where it flattened one of the Duchess’ patrolmen.

While it may not be as epic, this GM will always remember the brief yet adorable romance between Qiyet Outrunner and Seven-Foot Dan. The two hit it off quite well, passing the time spent on the R.N.S. Impossible breaking wooden boards and bricks. Alas, our heroine’s crush was, well… crushed in a spontaneous underwater cave-in.

Session Three had quite the showdown between Qiyet and Asrabey Varal. Due to her speed, she was the first to meet him in battle, giving him a decent shoulder wound before he was able to break into the central keep at Axis Island. Once inside, the two of them traded one blow after another, with Asrabey’s enchanted sword bathing the top-floor observatory in waves of flame that left the martial scientist at death’s door, and her friend Drew a charred corpse on the ground. She gave into the rage of her orcish blood and slit his throat in two places with a well-placed blow from her carrikal!

Session Four’s moment goes to the Duke of Slaughter himself, Lorcan Kell. After catching wind of the party sweeping up and down the shores of Flint Bay looking for Wolfgang Von Recklinghausen, he set a clever trap in Parity Lake, playing on the constables’ sympathies to draw them into his Theater of Scoundrels, where he extorted and humiliated them in front of a live audience of his well-trained criminal minions.

Session Five nearly saw the death of the party’s temporary shaman, Enna. While spending a night on Cauldron Hill with her teammates guarding Nevard Sechim, a demonic spirit garbed like Death himself appeared in the midst of the campsite during an attack, gradually phasing through the veil between worlds until Enna could see it clear as day. Grasping a bone-white scythe, it dealt her a savage blow of necrotic energy, but she survived!

Session Six. Qiyet pulled off a devastating charge attack against a shadowy foe, even while blinded! Her carrikal struck true, severing a weak point in her opponent’s leg and earning her a new attack technique.

Session Seven felt a bit like deja vu when one of the newer constables on the team, Talon Silverhawk, hurled a javelin at the fleeing gnome alchemist, Danisca. Despite being blinded by her Sense Seizure spell and having to aim around cover, he still managed to nail her with the attack!

Session Eight. Templeton had an ingenious idea: deafen the entire party with the loud report of a handcannon, rather than let them be affected by the wailing of a hundred souls pouring out of a Bleak Golem’s armor.

Session Ten’s bulk was taken up by a super-encounter, wherein the party had to descend into a malfunctioning witchoil laboratory and shut it down WITHOUT blowing up the city – and doing so while fighting no less than three Elite-ranked foes. Honors go to all five of my players for working together to not only save the city, but live to tell the tale!

Session Eleven was a little on the short side due to out-of-game weather complications, but there was still enough time for a fight against horrible monsters from beyond the natural world. Hugo ran around screaming for most of the fight, but regained his style points when he picked up the Nock Gun and unleashed seven barrels full of lead at one of the flying creatures, managing to hit with an actual weapon-based attack! When it refused to die, he finished it off next round with an enhanced magic missile fired from the customized weapon.

Session Twelve. Having captured Kaja Stewart, the party left her downstairs in an RHC mage-cell, charging her with the responsibility to come up with a way to counteract incursions from the Bleak Gate. She set to the task with reluctance at first, but Qiyet came to her cell late one night. She wanted to know why such a brilliant mind like Kaja’s was working for Macbannin. The martial scientist had done her homework – Kaja’s father, William, had served (and died) in the Third Yerasol War. Kaja claimed she was following in her father’s footsteps, but perhaps not in the way he might have envisioned. Macbannin had told her that she’d be helping a project that would deter future warfare, discouraging another pointless conflict over the archipelago between Risur and Danor. She wanted to save lives.

But Qiyet wouldn’t accept it. She forced Kaja to see what she’d done: by helping the mayor’s witchoil project, she’d had a hand in the deaths of many civilians, all of whom had their souls consumed by the foul black fluid, a far worse death than anything the battlefield could bring. Sadly, Kaja hung her head and returned to her work.

Session Thirteen landed Talon with his second NPC contact, Hans Weber. The Natural History Museum’s curator was all too glad to lend his expertise toward learning more about the Ancient relics, though he was curious as to how the Constabulary had come across them.

Talon: “They’re part of an ongoing investigation.”Hans: “So, they’re contraband?”Talon: “Maybe; we took them from some criminals.”Hans: “…Yes. That’s what that word means.”

In Session Fourteen, the party found themselves trying to escape from a room in which the floor was slowly opening to reveal a bottomless chasm. Qiyet hacked through the barrier from the outside, fervently trying to provide her allies with an escape route, while everyone inside scrambled to find handholds before there was no floor left to stand on. Hugo nonchalantly strolled in – prompting Qiyet a moment of panic as she reached out to stop him, but her hand grabbed nothing but air as the technologist plummeted to his doom!

…Or so it seemed. Cries of shock and disbelief rang out, the party forgetting their own imminent peril at the sight of their comrade’s death. Then Hugo’s voice could be heard, clear as day, certainly not a far-off echo from the depths of the pit. “I’m right here,” he said, being purposefully vague. He’d realized almost immediately that the trap was merely an illusion, and had elected to share the news with his team in the most jarring way possible.

“Pretty,” a nymph that was helping the party at Kida’s request, knew it was an illusion the whole time, and started giggling incessantly.

Session Fifteen contained the party’s first naval combat. The Audacious, steered by five sailors and captained by Talon faced off against Il Draçon de Mer, with a whole gunnery deck of cannons. Thanks to Qiyet’s skill as a lookout and the rest of the party’s successful gambit to take out the other ship’s rudder, the Audacious scored a pair of strikes while completely avoiding damage!

Session Sixteen was the first appearance of the sentient Gidim, Sijhen. Apparently able to summon monsters from Mavisha, it distracted the constables long enough to make an attempt on the life of Finona Duvall, one of Caius’ specialists at the dig site. But the party prevailed, driving it off in a single round, only to watch Xambria slip through their grasp…

Session Seventeen’s moment goes to Hugo for engineering himself into a living construct and installing a command circlet into his head to enable telepathy with the disabled golem long before being able to repair it properly, establishing contact at least a full chapter ahead of schedule!Honorable Mention: The GM’s interpretation of Benedict Pemberton’s smooth and gentlemanly southern accent, especially seeing as how his attempted French and German accents are rubbish.

Session Twenty-one. Calius (Talon), taking leave of his employer’s hotel during his scheduled watch, and unable to even bother to write out a full note to the effect of “please do not assassinate the occupant of this room,” simply tacked on a scrawled “NKILPLS” and left.

Session 22. In a moment that got just a little too real, Calius started rolling dice with Verzubak, trying to understand the dwarf’s philosophy of luck. Verzubak asked what numbers he’d want to roll on the two dice, and Calius answered, then his player proceeded to roll exactly that result.

Session 23. While hunting down a fleeing Ottavia Sacredote, Calias approached her campsite with a Stealth check of 3, blundering into her clearing and stepping on a dry branch with a loud snap. The oracle is deaf however, and remained completely oblivious to his approach, with -2 Perception result.

Session 25. Kida overcame a potentially deadly hallway full of pressure plates and crushing pillars in the Vault of Heresies by simply rolling a full bag of ball bearings down the length of the corridor.

Session 26. Forced to fight alone against a mad godhand, Talon looked up to see Hugo appear on the ledge above. “I’ll help you!” he yelled, and then fired a magic missile into a (cursed) mirror almost 50 feet away from the battle which had little to no bearing on Talon’s battle.

“Thanks!” Talon sarcastically shouted. “I was having trouble until you showed up and went all, ‘inanimate object, begone’!”

Session 27. After switching rather suddenly to the Team 3 characters, Qiyet’s player showed little trouble in acclimating to the role of Dima. The dwarf’s first encounter with Brakken began with “If you don’t mind my asking sir, how would you most prefer to die?”

In Session 29, a freak accident involving planar travel left Kida stranded alone in the Bleak Gate, with two hungry shadow-trolls chasing her through the darkened city streets. After getting mauled within an inch of her life, throwing a smoke bomb, dodging down narrow alleyways and finally sneaking her way through empty buildings to elude them, she remembered she’d recently gained the power to phase through earth and stone… oops.

Session 33. Following the Adulthood Challenge in the Ber’s Summer Court, the constables came to the realization that Hugo Von Gearkinson had officially become a man.

In an unrelated occurrence, Hugo turned a T-rex into a medium-sized velociraptor for all of six seconds using a prototype shrink ray.

Session 34. After enduring too much snark from Rush Munchausen, in Shantus’ Summer Court, Talon excused himself from the conversation. Instead of simply walking away, he mimed a few loping swings on a suspended floating lantern, while blurting, “Look, I’m Rush!”

Session 35. Having defeated a group of undead lizardmen attacking the Liss rail line, the party confiscated their frost-spewing sled crafted from the bones of the dead dragon Cheshimox. They then proceeded to caper about the work camp, ferrying the frightened workers and spouting lines like “get in, loser, we’re going skiing!”

Session 36. The look on everyone’s face when it was revealed that both Benedict Pemberton and Harkover Lee were dragons.

Session 37. Qiyet’s player realizing she could only succeed on a 20… and then rolled it. Qiyet teleported up to the flying Linia, somehow thrust her bare hand past the angel’s epic-level defenses, and grabbed a blood-slick cursed chain. From there, she allowed Hugo the opportunity to drag the angel halfway to the ground, and exposed the hook around her heart.

Session 42. A collection of memories:

Qiyet trying to speed-translate from a “You too Can Learn Elvish” book she’s barely read. The only word she knows is “Dog.”

Stellar roleplaying by Talon’s player, bantering with his old colleague Wheatley.

Hugo’s player for trying out a personal character arc involving mental illness, and Qiyet’s player for not trusting his splinter personality

Talon for telling the DM ‘no’ after it was stated that he’d turned to stone.